We live in very complex times. As much as we talk about integrated insights, it only seems to be getting worse.

If I sound a little bleak it’s because this statement has been shared ad nauseam: digital marketers are literally drowning in data.

Data sources range from anecdotal and trivial to scientifically precise, and span numerous systems both on premise, in the cloud, and property of third-party data providers. Using several approaches to arrive at a single truth (to within a reasonable variance, I might add) is extremely difficult. Continue reading The Pros and Cons of Big Data Democratization

It was over a year ago that I first wrote about do not track legislation, and luckily for most organizations the browser-provided imperative is loosely supported or regulated today, with very few sites adhering to interpretation and compliance of the preference.

Building a center of excellence analytics practice, whether it’s web analytics or data analytics, is bound to get you a lot of attention. The self-perpetuating cycle of asking business questions, diving deep into analytics data, providing actionable insights, and testing data-driven recommendations often scales by orders of magnitude quicker than the human resources and tools often allow.

My last article provided the top five arguments for implementing a tag management solution. By now you might even be sold on implementing one in the near future, but inevitably every organization has to examine many of the same use cases and value assessments.

Let’s face it, the competition is stiff, and vendors are at each other’s throats to get your business, but the toughest-fought battle will be with your own organization.

Customization of data collection code is of paramount importance to web analysts because it constitutes the fundamental building blocks required for advanced visitor segmentation above and beyond what software provides out of the box.

Unfortunately, customization doesn’t come free.

There is an opportunity cost of developer or publisher time and sometimes third-party vendor involvement is required. Due to this tradeoff, businesses and web analysts are often faced to make tough compromises when faced with the task of implementing web analytics code, or enhancing it to support better insights.

Those of us in the search community who have been around for a while can probably attest to this scenario: we’re at a trade show, speaking at a conference, or even having a drink at a bar and someone comes up to us to ask, “I’m paying $500 per month with an SEO company and I’m not happy with the results, can you have a look and let me know what you’d do differently?” Continue reading Top 5 Dead Giveaways of SEO Con Artists & How to Protect Yourself